When most people bump into a corner of Sumari time, they’re delighted, but they don’t know how to find it again, when it’s there all the while.

Stacks and stacks of the wrong kind of hours won’t give you even one minute of good Sumari time, though. Because in a strange way, a Sumari hour is the other side of an earth hour. I mean, all of a sudden, for example, 11 o’clock becomes transparent; it is what it is, on top, but it’s something else too, underneath. And you can peer through—well, time itself.

The Beginning

It’s deceptive to say that thus and so “happened in the beginning,” or that “in the beginning was the word,” or whatever, because there was no official Beginning when God suddenly came parading out of nothingness, bearing the ingredients of mountains, oceans, and land, and trailing sky banners proclaiming the opening of the universe, or the creation of life from a sea of gasses.

There are multitudinous beginnings. “The Beginning” is only the one you came in on, so to speak, which is rather like coming into a dream in the middle and wondering what happened earlier. In dreams, everything really happens at once, even though there seems to be a beginning and ending … the past and present and future merge … and the universe is like that in a way. You’re bound to wonder what went on or how long it’s all been going on, not realizing that in a matter of speaking, it just started when you got there. And in another way, it really isn’t there at all.

If you dream that you’re in a jungle, for instance, no vines or tangled undergrowth climb up the bedpost, and no exotic animals prowl between the window and the door. Yet the jungle certainly seems real. Where did it come from, or when did it begin? The universe is like the dream jungle. It exists quite properly, yet in the most profound way it makes no sense to ask when it began. It begins each day, each moment, at each point of our contact with it. The gods exist in the same manner, like a giant species of consciousness, striding psychological paths of vast proportions that never really physically appear in the world at all.

The gods and the universe really begin everyplace and everywhere at once, at every point. Our psychological reality rises from an inner inconceivable divine mind that’s invisible to us, since we are It, earthized, individualized. We’re the gods in camouflage.

On Methods

(“This small chapter is very important,” Oversoul Seven said, “so do pay attention, Tweety, and anyone else who might be listening.”)